Do you use Google search, maps, or Gmail? They exist because Google wanted a profit. Huge recession almost as bad as the Great Depression, yet no people starving on the street or waiting in soup lines because you can buy mass-produced food cheaper? Thanks to profit. Posting things on the internet and being able to spread ideas ad videos about TZM? Thanks to internet companies seeking profit. Totalitarian regimes falling around Africa and Middle East due to organized mass protests? Thanks to Twitter and Facebook wanting a profit. Things like gay marriage, women's rights, and minority group's rights being legalized despite the general population being against it? Thanks to companies not wanting to be forced to discriminate, accept money from everyone, and seeking profit. Also thanks to organizations fighting this injustice seeking personal profit.
Plenty of examples. Ones you are using to post about all this are blatantly obvious ones.

Problem with China has more to do with corporations polluting other people's property (air space), and the legal system not being willing to defend them. As for the water example, nobody used to pay for clean water, because until about 100 to 200 years ago we did't have clean water. As for not paying for water at all, we've been paying for water since the dawn of civilization. It was a scarce and expensive thing in the Biblical middle east and other ancient desert cultures.



I don't really know how to fix it, other than vote the politicians out, boycott the corporations (like people are doing with BP), and bring mass class-action lawsuits against corporations. But this is actually a problem that's even bigger for TZM: The biggest problem will be that people will always seek profit, and thus, even in a TZM syste, someone will find a way to corrupt politicians to make sure they can have more "needs" than others.



How can you believe that, when profit and making money has been behind things like cars, planes, phones, computers, automated robotic machines, drugs and medical treatments, and a whole slew of other things that have taken us out of the dark ages? Are you proposing that the only good "well being" way to live is to work on a farm with 0 technology?


I think as long as you guys don't realize that seeking profit IS attempting to maximize the well being on oneself and one's stakeholders, you'll just keep wishing for a utopia based on essentially communist ideas, not even understanding what it is you are attacking, or the pitfalls of what you are proposing. After all, corporate profit means that many people/customers who needed things (food, medicine, technology) had their needs fulfilled, that lenders, employees, and all taxes that support the government and social programs are paid, and that there is still enough left (the profit part) to make sure that many people who invested in the company are better off and are able to pay for their needs too.

You guys talking about government + 51% threat are forgetting one VERY important thing:

Paper money does not compute hashes, no matter how big your pile of money is.
For the government t put those millions of dollars to work to destroy Bitcoin, they first need to actually buy or make A LOT of computing hardware. Too bad for them, almost all good hashing ATI cards are sold out around the world, and we miners aren't willing to part with ours

What was the problem of simply backing up an encrypted password-protected version of the wallet file on a home computer?

BTW, slap an Apple logo on the case, and it'll sell like hotcakes. Just have to sell it outside US/EU

That's our current inflationary currency versus gold scenario...

And that's fiat money in high inflation (hyper-inflation?) economies...


Um... I don't get it... There's nothing explaining where the prices are coming from, or what they are, in the financial viewpoint section...

Common statement will then be, "Why should I bother to invest in making things better for everyone, when everyone else is already doing it?"
Once enough people start saying it, that society will crumble. Which is exactly how Soviet Union worked, and why it crumbled...

But, again, that's no different from current inflationary fiat currency, isn't it? What is being described is actually a real a problem for large companies and banks now, who are sitting on large piled of degrading cash, and can't find people to lend it to (more specifically invest in). What am I missing here?

I'm trying to understand what this basic interest is. In this article is feels as if Gesell somehow keeps forgetting that "money" itself is a commodity, too, also subject to laws of supply/demand (USD is same as sugar, oil, etc. People just don't think of it that way). In which case, wouldn't "basic interest" be the same as charging someone a premium for a rare commodity that may otherwise have lower use/production value? (I have a special tool that's fairly cheap to make, but because only I have it, I can charge you a bit extra due to your high demand for it, simply because I know you'll be willing to pay for it)

But USD and gold also have very high demurrage costs. What will stop someone with hoards of depreciating money from just charging interest that is higher than their demurrage costs, if they are the scarce holder of a lot of funds (i.e. no other competing lenders)? I guess on an inflationary scale you can get to a point where EVERYONE will not want to hold money, and will run to the bank to cash in checks, and run to the store to buy goods, as soon as they get any. Which is what happened in Germany. But, isn't that what we already have with out inflation-driven economy?
By the way, just remembered, this would also put a large strain on society as a whole because a lot of work/time/money will also be wasted just to keep this type of money going. In Germany, during their high inflation period, banks had to hire a lot of skilled people just to run their teller windows, due to huge influx of people wanting to cash out, and that pull of skilled people from the rest of the economy actually ended up hurting them, too...

Only way I can see that such a bank can control price levels is by creating or destroying this free-money, thus keeping it's supply relatively even with the supply of goods it's pegged to. That's also pretty much what our central bank already does, though they sometimes do it in the roundabout ways...

Hmm. I guess in this case I would ask, why would the producing member of society, one waiting for someone who is sitting on money, want something that deteriorates, too? I would think deteriorating money would also not be wanted by those getting it, just like it wouldn't be wanted those hoarding it? In which case, wouldn't it be inevitable that someone who is selling goods will start to refuse this free-money, and ask for something else instead (any other more durable commodity)?
Also, I would likely not rent (loan) money to someone who will just have it sit and deteriorate, and since they are able to pay back at least the same amount, they are likely increasing the worth (amount) or my money by putting it to work. So, again, what's to stop me from asking them to pay me back more (interest), besides competition from other money hoarders?



Where is that metaphor?

Reading this text, there are some somewhat blatant flaws there. If I was a financier in such a free-money economy, what's to stop me from asking that when you pay back the loan, you add a few extra stamps or bills to the money you return, i.e. charge you interest on the loan?
There seems to be some lack of knowledge/understanding about things on his part, too. For example,
The answer is, a bank that loans money to many houses calculates the probability that each new loan will default. The interest is calculated based on the overall chance of default per year, plus required operating costs (paying for employees and stuff). If the bank is operating in a perfectly competitive economy (no profit) is enough to ensure that if someone during the year defaults on their loan, that 5% interest fee should be just enough to cover the paychecks of employees, operating cost of the bank, and maybe still allow them to make an extra loan or two. So, again, time and/or risk.

If the answer is "there is already a lot of money going around, so the quantity of money will drive interest through competition to zero," that ignores the part where a lot of money means each bill costs less, meaning you just need more of them to buy the same thing, which, again, means that you will likely have to go to someone specific and scarce who has a lot of this money, who can still charge you interest. If the situation becomes too inflationary, likely people will abandon this money for something else.
I just really don't see a difference between money being inflated by a central government that prints more bills, and money being inflated by design, with the central government printing more stamps (bills)

It's not sacrifice, it's investment in your own retirement and long-term care

Heh, that's a rather weird statement, considering the human lifespan used to be an average of maybe 30 years just a few centuries ago, and considering how comfortable we are with things like apps, podcasts, vlogs, twitters, snacks, and other short-term bits of information and activities.
To me, personally, interest is a guarantee that I will either get paid for use of my resources, or for taking on risk. No different than if I was to charge someone daily rental fee for using my power tools or my car, regardless of what they use it for.

In the long-run, though, if someone has an idea about something we have been using for a very long time, using very old technology, chances are someone else has thought of it hundreds of years ago already, and the idea already failed. I wouldn't be surprised if this stamp or destructive money idea was conceived many times in our past, or was simply destructive by it's nature, such as some culture using something that rots or withers (like tulips!

Actually, I was thinking of using this for international payments (Seller wants Indian Rupees, buyer wants to pay in USD), since  that is still rather expensive to do ($20 for a transfer or so). For buying within USD system, it's fairly cheap to buy using just USD with our current credit card system, and the fees involved with transferring money from BTC to USD, and then from the exchange account to the personal bank account, will likely not save you any money.

Though I wouldn't call gold, silver, or stock a "failure"

Yeah... I guess I just don't get it. How can money be free if the interest payment on money is often payment for time, and time is never free?...
Or maybe the author is just using a definition of "money" I'm not familiar with. though reading the Introduction to Free Money chapter, the entire "buy and attach stamps" idea is basically a more convoluted version of having inflationary money that inflated 5% a year...

The idea is not to launder money, but to send money to people in other countries possibly cheaper than using the current methods, with Bitcoin as the intermediary. But yes, I do believe I have misunderstood the OP's point. On the other hand, I think that Bitcoin will have much easier adoption if it is at first introduced as just an intermediary of exchange/transfer, since people will find it easier to use dollars or rupees without caring what's happening behind the scenes.

Can you elaborate on this a bit please? I think I may be confused as to what definition of the word "interest" you are using here...

Hmm, not a lot of merchant support for gold, silver, or stock certificates...

Holy jebus the fees are high! Have you guys considered setting up a system where people can open their own accounts in those same banks, and then transferring from their account to yours for free? (or at least a very low fee, since it's just an accounting entry for the bank)

Yeah, um, I'm TRYING to get something like that set up, where people can automatically send money to someone else, and the system automatically buys Bitcoin on an exchange and sells it to a different currency in a different country or something in the background, but there are a TON of legal and regulatory issues with even getting a bank account that could participate in this. And I don't have the $25,000,000 of my own backing to open my own bank  

1. Actually, this one is kind of easy. Market prices are based on supply/demand. Destroying things reduces it's supply. The more of something is destroyed in the free market, the more expensive it becomes, and the less people want it or are willing to pay for it. Eventually the market will get to a point where continuing to destroy some things is just not profitable any more. UNLESS we have a non-free market player, such as the government, deciding that some things are needed for the general good of the population, and subsidizes that good. Example is corn, which we use in many of our foods, which is subsidized to the point where it costs more to grow it than it's sold for, and which is screwing up our land with overfarming.
As for companies polluting, the bigger issue is the lack of a legal recourse for people to defend their property against polluting factories. I would argue that that's more a problem of the legal system than a free market.

2. People are greedy. They want things done to make them rich. If they are freely allowed to have other people work for them to make them richer, and pay those other people competitive wages, those other people will have money to buy food and not starve if they chose not to. That's not the case in Africa, where greedy free-market people are being kept out by greedy gun-toting people.